Tag Archives: book

The following correspondence originally took place on my friend, Daniel Sv., after he posted a photo he took, and subsequently tagged me within his comments section, upon my act of “liking” it…

Daniel Sv.: Found this at the Barnes and Noble in Princeton. Even academics seem to be debating this now.

“Against Democracy” by Jason Brennan

Daniel Sv.: i’m surprised you’re against it. i guess you believe in small groups coming together for communal good?

Rayn: You’re surprised? I can only suggest that you read more of my posts, then…

Rayn:

“Yo, Dawg! We heard that you don’t like the tyranny of the majority over minority groups…So, we legitimized the authority of an ultra-minority through a voting majority, so they can tyrannically rule over everybody, accordingly, while you formally select the next elect minority of tyranny to fully control your humanity, in perpetuity!”(Artwork by Rayn, and originally located here)

Daniel F.: That is why the United States is a Constitutional Republic. If two wolves and a lamb are voting on what’s for dinner we have some ground rules in place that clearly stipulate that the lamb is NOT on the menu. (Of course there needs to be a system in place to ensure that these rules are not simply disregarded.)

Rayn: Thanks for clearing that up. It was the very point of my short, concise article, of course… But, yeah… Thanks!

Daniel Sv.: Rayn, ah yes i remember now. been feeding my head with machine learning, so some previous things are fuzzy to me.

Daniel Sv.: Just read a chapter now. Very fascinating. Shows how enlightenment thinkers thought getting the then ignorant masses into politics would ennoble us where we would educate ourselves and engage in rational debate. However, we have proved to be not as rational as enlightenment thinkers thought we were (we are capable of rationality, but it’s not our fundamental driver). Therefore, except for a few, politics turns “hobbits into hooligans”, with politics actually making us more stupid as we only seek information that reinforces our biases and discards information which may contradict it since we invest politics with our ego and such contradictory information would crush it. Politics therefore actually corrupts the soul more.

Rayn: Interesting conclusion about corrupting the soul. – especially in consideration of the fact that this article, by Jeffrey A. Tucker, from last year, was making the rounds again, today:

Daniel Sv.: Of course, one can look at things scientifically, but we would still have our biases. Part of science is to subsume your ego and allow your opinions to be peer reviewed. To put it another way, you would need to allow that different perspectives exist.

Srinivas S.: Our democracy has an electoral college in place for a reason, that is to keep our democracy in place. The media is so anti Trump that I think is ridiculous. I saw some tripe TV show tonight in CBS called the good fight where the lead character plans to move to France after viewing Trump’s election. That is the kind of bias Trump gets. What they are doing is fomenting rifts and disunity.

Tony K.: I wonder whether there is a chapter devoted to returning voting rights back only to those that are property holders.

Rayn: I read the book when I was nine or ten, and then put Genaire up on it, later – hence, the irony of him claiming that I can’t handle it, while simultaneously biting off my lines! “Don’t sweat the technique,” Genaire!